A Writer's Notebook (74 page)

The director's house. A large white frame house, with official furniture, a chandelier in the middle of each room, and stiff, uncomfortable chairs in the drawing-room. It faces the sea and has a large veranda which is used as a parlour. The garden, with its bougainvillæa, crotons, cassias, papaias and
flame of the forest, has the bedraggled look of a garden in the banlieue belonging to a retired tradesman.

The punishment cells. They are long and narrow and they contain a wooden pallet for a bed, a stool and a small table fixed to the wall. They are hot, and lit only by an opening over the heavy door. The convicts sentenced to solitary confinement are locked in and let out for an hour morning and evening. The cells at the end of the corridor are pitch black, for the light only comes in by the door at the entrance to the passage.

Most of the convicts live in dormitories of fifty or sixty beds, but there are a certain number of cells either above the dormitories on the first floor or in a separate courtyard, and these are given to well-behaved prisoners who ask for them. Sometimes, however, they dislike being alone and ask to be put back into the dormitories. In each of these cells there is a hammock and a small table on which the convict keeps his bits and pieces, a shaving-mop, a razor, a hair brush and a photograph or two. On the walls they tack illustrations from the picture papers.

The convicts. They are dressed in striped pink and white pyjamas and wear a round straw hat and shoes with wooden soles and leather-tops, but no socks. Their hair is cut short and cut very badly. Their food consists of grey bread, two good-sized loaves a day, soup made of bones and meat, potatoes and cabbage-tops, beef, a ration of cheese if they are well-behaved, and a ration of wine. They make their cigarettes out of little blue packets of coarse tobacco. They sit about on the verandas or stoeps of the house, chatting and smoking, or wander, some alone, some in charge of a warder, and work desultorily. They are emaciated notwithstanding their abundant food, they suffer
from fever and hook-worm, and they have staring eyes. They don't look quite sane. Rum is the great luxury and they all have knives.

No warder dares go into a dormitory at night, after lock-up, or he wouldn't come out alive.

The gateway of the prison is open all day long and they saunter in and out at liberty.

The
porte-clefs
, under-warders, almost officials, are well-behaved convicts; and they live in separate quarters and wear felt hats instead of straw. They are not liked by the others, and not seldom get themselves killed.

The executioner, a convict, has two mongrel dogs trained to guard him, and they prowl about the compound at night. He has his own little house near the director's. The other convicts don't speak to him and his food is fetched from the prison kitchen by his assistant. He spends his leisure strolling in the public garden and fishing, and he sells his fish to the Director's wife.

The guillotine is in a small room within the prison, but it is reached by a separate door from the outside. To make sure that it will work well a banana stem is used for practice because it is of the same thickness as a man's neck. From the time a man is strapped up to the time his head is off, it takes only thirty seconds. The executioner gets a hundred francs for each execution.

The previous executioner disappeared and they thought he had run away. He was found three weeks later hanging to a tree with knife thrusts in his body, and he was only found because a flock of vultures,
urubus
they are called, were seen clustering round a tree. He had known the convicts were out
to kill him and had asked to be sent to Cayenne or back to France. They had caught him and after stabbing him to death had carried him into the jungle.

The
relégués
, habitual criminals, are sent to St. Jean not exactly under sentence, but to be kept there for the protection of society. They catch butterflies and beetles which they mount in boxes and sell, or make ornaments out of buffalo horn. In one part of the camp there is a newspaper kiosk, just like a kiosk in a small French station, with books for hire and papers a month old neatly set out. Over it is written
Le crédit est mort
. In another part is a small theatre with a stage and rough scenery painted by the
relégués
.

The sea is shark-infested, and they say with a laugh that the sharks are the best jailers.

I spent today inquiring into the motives of the murders which had caused the convicts to be sentenced to what is virtually life-long imprisonment, and I was surprised to discover that though on the surface it looked as though they had killed from love, jealousy, hatred, in revenge for some wrong or merely in a fit of passion, when I asked a little further it was borne in upon me that not far below the surface the motive was pecuniary. In one way or another money was at the bottom of every murder I inquired into but one. The exception was a young lad, a shepherd, who had raped a little girl and when she cried out, afraid people would hear, he had strangled her. He is only eighteen now.